Juan Gabriel Vásquez > Quotes

“There is no more disastrous mania, no more dangerous whim, than the speculation over roads not taken.”
― Juan Gabriel Vásquez, The Sound of Things Falling

“Adulthood brings with it the pernicious illusion of control, and perhaps even depends on it. I mean that mirage of dominion over our own life that allows us to feel like adults, for we associate maturity with autonomy, the sovereign right to determine what is going to happen to us next. Disillusion comes sooner or later, but it always comes, it doesn’t miss an appointment, it never has.”
― Juan Gabriel Vásquez, The Sound of Things Falling

“Experience, or what we call experience, is not the inventory of our pains, but rather the learned sympathy towards the pain of others.”
― Juan Gabriel Vásquez, The Sound of Things Falling

“The saddest thing that can happen to a person is to find out their memories are lies.”
― Juan Gabriel Vásquez, The Sound of Things Falling

“Now that so many years have passed, now that I remember with the benefit of an understanding I didn't then have, I think of that conversation and it seems implausible that its importance didn't hit me in the face. (And I tell myself at the same time that we're terrible judges of the present moment, maybe because the present doesn't actually exist: all is memory, this sentence that I just wrote is already a memory, this word is a memory that you, reader, just read).”
― Juan Gabriel Vásquez, The Sound of Things Falling

“In the darkness of the bedroom I thought of that, although thinking in the darkness is not advisable: things seem bigger or more serious in the darkness, illnesses more destructive, the presence of evil closer, indifference more intense, solitude more profound.”
― Juan Gabriel Vásquez, The Sound of Things Falling

“Uno es feliz hasta que la caga de cierta forma, luego no hay manera de recuperar eso que uno era antes”
― Juan Gabriel Vasquez, El ruido de las cosas al caer

“Remembering tires a person out. this is something they don't teach us. Exercising one's memory is an exhausting activity. It draws our energy and wears down our muscles.”
― Juan Gabriel Vásquez, The Sound of Things Falling

“A person is from wherever they feel best, and roots are for plants. Everyone knows that, don't they?”
― Juan Gabriel Vásquez, The Informers

“So you fell out of the sky, too?" the Little Prince asked the pilot who tells the story, and I thought yes, I'd fallen out of the sky, too, but there was no possible testimony of my fall, there was no black box that anybody could consult, nor was there any black box of Ricardo Laverde's fall, human lives don't have these technological luxuries to fall back on.”
― Juan Gabriel Vásquez, The Sound of Things Falling

“...the nostalgia for things that weren't yet lost.”
― Juan Gabriel Vásquez, The Sound of Things Falling

“they talked of intentions and projects, convinced, as only new lovers can be, that saying what you wanted was the same as saying who you are.”
― Juan Gabriel Vásquez, The Sound of Things Falling

“her face was like a party that everyone had left.”
― Juan Gabriel Vásquez, The Sound of Things Falling

“People are the same all over the world, I imagine, people who react like that to their countries conspiracies: turning them into tales that are told, like children’s fables, and also into place in the memory or the imagination, a place where we go as tourists, to revive nostalgia or to try to find something we’ve lost.”
― Juan Gabriel Vásquez, The Shape of the Ruins

“the kind of sadness we tolerate because it appears at happy moments”
― Juan Gabriel Vásquez, The Sound of Things Falling

“Childhood doesn’t exist for children; however, for adults childhood is that former country we lost one day and which we futilely seek to recover by inhabiting it with diffuse or nonexistent memories, which in general are nothing but shadows of other dreams.”
― Juan Gabriel Vásquez, La forma de las ruinas

“It wasn’t the first time someone had disappeared from my life due to my own fault: due to my tendency to solitude and silence, dut to my sometimes unjustifiable reserve, due to my inability to keep relationships alive (even those I have with people I love or who genuinely interest me). This has always been one of my great defects, and it has caused me more than one disappointment and has dissapointed other more than once. There’s nothing I can do aboutn it, however, because nobody changes their nature by the mere force of will.”
― Juan Gabriel Vásquez, La forma de las ruinas

“No hay manía más funesta, ni capricho más peligroso, que la especulación o la conjetura sobre los caminos que no tomamos.”
― Juan Gabriel Vásquez, El ruido de las cosas al caer

“La edad adulta trae consigo la ilusión perniciosa del control, y acaso depende de ella. Quiero decir que es ese espejismo de dominio sobre nuestra propia vida lo que nos permite sentirnos adultos, pues asociamos la adultez con la autonomía, el soberano derecho a determinar lo que va a sucedernos enseguida. El desengaño viene más pronto o más tarde, pero viene siempre, no falta a la cita, nunca lo ha hecho. Cuando llega lo recibimos sin demasiada sorpresa, pues nadie que viva lo suficiente puede sorprenderse de que su biografía haya sido moldeada por eventos lejanos, por voluntades ajenas, con poca o ninguna participación de sus propias decisiones. Esos largos procesos que acabarán por toparse con nuestra vida -a veces para darle el empujón que necesitaba, a veces para hacer estallar en pedazos nuestros planes más espléndidos- suelen estar ocultos como corrientes subterráneas, como meticulosos desplazamientos de las capas tectónicas, y cuando por fin se da el terremoto invocamos las palabras que hemos aprendido a usar para tranquilizarnos, ACCIDENTE, CASUALIDAD, a veces DESTINO.”
― Juan Gabriel Vásquez, The Sound of Things Falling

“Lo importante en nuestra sociedad no es lo que pasa, sino quién cuenta lo que pasa.”
― Juan Gabriel Vásquez, Las reputaciones

“I don’t know when I started to realize that my country’s past was incomprehensible and obscure to me, a real shadowy terrain, nor can I remember the precise moment when all that i’d believed so trustworthy and predictable—the place I’d grown up, whose language I speak and customs I know, the place whose past I was taught in school and in university, whose present I have become accustomed to interpreting and pretending I understand—began to turn into a place of shadows out of whcih jumped horrible creatures as soon as we dropped our guard. With time I have come to think that this is the true reason why writers write aboutn the places of childhood and adolescence and even their early touth: you don’t write about what you know and understand, and much less do you write because you know and understand, but because you understand that all your knowledge and comprehension is false, a mirage and an illusion, so your books are not, could not be, more than elaborate displays of disorientation: extensive and multifarious declarations of preplexity. All that I thought was so clear, you then think, now turns out to be full of duplicities and hidden intentions, like a friend who betrays us. To that revelation, which is always annoying and often frankly painful, the writer responds in the only way one knows how: with a book. And that’s how you try to mitigate your disconcertion, reduce the space between what you don’t know and what can be known, and most of all resolve your profound disagreement with that unpredictable reality. “Out of the quarrel with others we make rhetoric,” wrote Yeats. “Out of the quarrel with ourselves we make poetry.” And what happens when both quarrels arise at the same time, when fighting with the world is a reflection or a transfiguration of the subterranean but constant confrontation you have with yourself? Then you write a book like the one I’m writing now, and blindly trust that the book will mean something to somebody else.”
― Juan Gabriel Vásquez, La forma de las ruinas

“I was also surprised by the alacrity and dedication we devote to the damaging exercise of remembering, which after all brings nothing good and serves only to hinder our normal functioning, like those bags of sand athletes tie around their calves for training.”
― Juan Gabriel Vásquez, The Sound of Things Falling

“Θέλω να γευτώ τη σιωπή, σκέφτηκα τότε: ένα στίχο του Λεόν ντε Γκρεΐφ, ενός ακόμα από τους ποιητές που συνήθιζα ν' ακούω στο Σπίτι του Σίλβα - η ποίηση μας βρίσκει τις πιο απροσδόκητες στιγμές. "Θέλω να γευτώ τη σιωπή, / ανίατος από συντροφιά. / Αφήστε με μόνο.”
― Juan Gabriel Vásquez, The Sound of Things Falling

“If there’s one thing I regret it’s not having told my father how much I admired and loved him. My only gesture of affection was a quick kiss on the forehead two days before he died. The kiss tasted like sugar and I felt like a thief who furtively stole something that no longer belong to anybody. Why do we hide our feelings? Out of cowardice? Out of egotism? With a mother it’s different: we cover her with flowers, gifts and sweet phrases. What is it that prevents us from affectionately confronting our father and telling him, face to face, how much we love or admire him? On the other hand, why do we curse him under our breath when he puts us in our place? Why do we react with wickedness and not affection when the occasion presents itself? Why are we brave with taunts and cowards with affection? Why did I never tell my father these things but I tell them to you, who are probably too young to understand them yet? One night I wanted to speak to my father ion his room but found him asleep. As I quietly began to leave the room, I heard my sleeping father, in a desperate voice, say: “No, papa, no!” What strange, agitated dream was my father experiencing with his father? And if one thing caught my attention, beyond the enigma of the dream, was that my father was seventy-eight years old at that time and my grandfather had been dead for at least a quarter of a century. Does a man have to die to speak to his father?”
― Juan Gabriel Vásquez, La forma de las ruinas

“The I realized no one wants to hear heroic stories, but everyone likes to be told about someone else's misery.”
― Juan Gabriel Vásquez, The Sound of Things Falling

“La edad adulta trae consigo la ilusión perniciosa del control, y acaso dependa de ella. Quiero decir que es ese espejismo de dominio sobre nuestra propia vida lo que nos permite sentirnos adultos, pues asociamos la adultez con la autonomía, el soberano derecho a determinar lo que va a sucedernos enseguida. El desengaño viene más pronto o más tarde, pero viene siempre, no falta a la cita, nunca lo ha hecho.”
― Juan Gabriel Vásquez, El ruido de las cosas al caer

“Δεν υπάρχει πιο αξιοθρήνητη μανία ή πιο επικίνδυνο καπρίτσιο απ' το να κάνουμε εικασίες για δρόμους που δεν έχουμε πάρει.”
― Juan Gabriel Vásquez, The Sound of Things Falling

“eso fue lo que me pasó: que estaba sola, me había quedado sola, ya no había nadie entre mi muerte y yo. Ser huérfano es eso: no hay nadie por delante, uno es el siguiente en la línea.”
― Juan Gabriel Vásquez, El ruido de las cosas al caer

“And I tell myself at the same time that we're terrible judges of the present moment, maybe because the present doesn't actually exist: all is memory, this sentence that I just wrote is already a memory, this word is a memory that you, reader, just read.”
― Juan Gabriel Vásquez, The Sound of Things Falling

“The city was poisoned with the venom of small fundamentalisms, and the venom ran beneath us, like dirty water in the sewers.”
― Juan Gabriel Vásquez, La forma de las ruinas